Is all life predestined, or is existence blown about by the whims of entropy? If we restarted the universe with the same world generating seed a la Minecraft, would it all play out the same??? These are ginormous questions that we do not get into in this episode! Instead, we’re examining slightly more manageable examples of randomness in nature, in computing, and even in ourselves.
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[The Scientific Definition]
The Lost Boarding Pass Problem
https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/23162
The Secretary Problem
https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~ted/210F10/References/Secretary.pdf
The Sleeping Beauty Problem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW27QJYNXtU
[Trivia Question]
Sum of numbers on a D120 vertex where 10 faces meet
[Fact Off]
Fastest computer worm in history was the random-scanning worm called Slammer (aka the Sapphire Worm)
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/IEEESP03.pdf
https://www.science.org/content/article/fastest-worm-ever
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1523881
Effectiveness of randomly promoting employees in a business instead of promoting by merit
[Ask the Science Couch]
Humans are (maybe) bad at intuitively understanding or predicting randomness
https://cocosci.princeton.edu/tom/papers/hard.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5215234/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5933241/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027717302895
https://zhaolab.psych.ubc.ca/pdfs/Zhao_2014_JEPHPP.pdf
Patreon bonus: pseudorandom number generators and randomization seeds
https://www.random.org/randomness/
https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/pseudorandom_number_generator
https://www.acsac.org/2003/papers/79.pdf
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
[Butt One More Thing]
Dung beetles that attach themselves to butts to find poop non-randomly
https://www.sfzoo.org/dung-beetle/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19169550/
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